Though the best way to honour them might be to go and aim a venomous spit at every monarch and general and armsdealer in the world, and at the fatcat ministers in their limos everywhere who are the successors of the ministers who sent uninformed and unprivileged men off to risk themselves in stupid battles.

Trench warfare hardly bears thinking about, so contemptuous was it of the lives of what were frankly called at the time, the lower classes. My only reservation about the belated Irish commemoration of northerner and southerner, Protestant and Catholic together in the trenches, is that it obscures that fact. As always, Ireland is dulled by British and Irish nationalisms to the rank realities of the class system.

But as regards our general attitude to Britain, I think that this weekend's inclusiveness is less of a breakthrough than it appears. I also think that we owe much, much more to Great Britain than we are quite ready to acknowledge.

The two are related. It seems to me that though the Irish state refused to honour the Irish who fought for England, going over to England and joining up was never a thing that bothered ordinary people . . . at least, not until the Troubles broke out in 1969. I think that if Kevin Myers had ever been able to get out and about in normal Irish life he would have discovered that far from objecting to fellow citizens fighting in the armies of our legendary oppressor, most people were all for it. This was for straightforward economic reasons. Some of the Irish who signed up in 1914 and 1939 signed up, I suppose, for adventure or even for idealistic reasons . . . idealism being a shorthand word for being taken in by the propaganda of the warmongers.

But mostly they did it for the money. The wife and kids got money while the man was out there. The man got fed and clothed. There was a pension afterwards.

And in my grandfather's time, you had a chance of a job in one of Dublin's Protestant enterprises as a reward for your loyalty. It was well worth taking a chance on not getting killed.

The lives of most Irish people for most of the 20th century were dominated by poverty. Wartime was only one of the times that access to Britain alleviated that poverty. In these days of abstract gestures between one nation and another . . . when they're apologising as if they were people for wrongs done to each other . . . we should be saying thank you to our neighbour. It should be a very big 'thank you'.

I am certain that Irish people would have died in the streets from hunger, 30 and 40 years after getting our much-vaunted independence, if it had not been for the emigrant boat. As it was, minds died, and hearts died.

There was work across the Irish Sea when there was no work here . . . unless you count the work of the clerks in the employment agencies that arranged our one-way tickets to menial jobs over there and took the few quid back out of our wages.

The wealthy could afford the fare to the States. The rest of us could barely get ourselves to Holyhead.

It is perfectly understandable that we do not think of being grateful for work: Britain was buying our labour . . . there was no philanthropy on their side. But other opportunities opened to us over there that then, and even now, are not open here . . . ways of being trained and educated, ways of putting together qualifications, ways into professional jobs in, say, the probation service or hospital or university administration, ways of making paralegal and paramedical and business careers.

Women, especially, had much wider and better chances across the water than they had here, for almost the whole of the 20th century.

To a great extent this was due to the glorious tradition of adult education in Britain, which has managed for several centuries now to offer first and second chances at higher education to people excluded from it on grounds of gender, age or circumstance. The Open University is the latest and the most substantial institution created to serve that constituency. It so happens that last week, at a conferring ceremony in the beautiful Symphony Hall in Birmingham, the OU gave me an honorary doctorate.

"I am a proud Irish patriot, " I began my reply to the encomium that was read out, and I went on to express my gratitude to Great Britain for the employment and the other opportunities I got there, over the years, that people of my generation couldn't get at home.

I feel that it in no way betrays our own history . . . or, indeed, takes anything away from the desirability of an all-island Irish Ireland achieved by consent . . . to acknowledge an individual debt of that kind. Still, it was difficult to do it.

By coincidence, what I at last found myself able to say was a tiny effort of the same kind as yesterday's Somme ceremony . . . the effort to move away from the constricting myth in which the Irish are always victims, and nothing else, of the Anglo-Irish situation. The effort to tell a more complex truth.